City Dangles $1 Million to School With Best 'Smart Gun' Design

BROOKLYN, NY — Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams thinks that gun technology needs an upgrade, and he's offered up more than $1 million from his budget to help make it happen.

"Smart guns" are weapons that can only by fired by an authorized user. At a Tuesday press conference, Adams reiterated a position he'd taken earlier this month during a symposium he hosted on the technology: that guns haven't changed since the 1980's, despite technological leaps in many other fields.

To encourage smart gun development, the borough president has started a competition in which teams from area universities will produce prototype devices that can then be evaluated by a panel of judges.

The winning team will earn $1 million from Adams' budget for their school. The panel will also award $10,000 to the teams behind the five best ideas to help them further develop their proposals.

Schools have until Jan. 1 to enter the competition, and until June 1 to submit a design. Each team must incorporate a professor or a graduate student, but anyone else, including non-students, can participate.

Next summer, the designs will be publicly revealed and judged by the NYPD, gun control advocate Leah Gunn Barrett, and Margot Hirsch of the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, among others.

Theo Allen, a math student at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering who attended Tuesday's event, said he'll be participating in the competition, and mentioned three technologies he'll look at: a gun that can be locked using a smart phone app; a gun activated by a fingerprint reader; and a gun that can only be used if triggered by a digital chip embedded in a nearby device, like a ring.

Allen said that he became interested in gun control following the December 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting that killed 20 children and six adults.

"It's the fact that 91 people every day are killed with firearms," Allen said, explaining his motivation. "We need to take a stand to stop the killing."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2013, 33,636 Americans died from gunshots, an average of about 92 per day. Of those, 63 percent were classified as suicides.

Kurt Becker, Tandon's Vice Dean for Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, said the school will begin with an "ideation competition" to encourage students to think about possible smart gun technologies. He said the challenge will be approached like the "hack-a-thon," with prototypes hopefully developed in a new maker space that will open on campus this fall.

Even if smart gun technology took a leap forward, about 300 million existing weapons would still be in the hands of U.S. residents. Leah Gunn Barrett, the activist, said recently that a buyback program would be needed to remove those weapons from American homes and streets.

It also remains to be seen whether the technology will be viewed as dependable enough for widespread use. Benjamin Tucker, the NYPD's First Deputy Commissioner, spoke Tuesday in support of the design competition.

"So many young people have their lives taken by gun violence," he said. "Why not have our young people figure out ways to keep us safe?"

But afterward, Tucker told Patch that the NYPD wouldn't be using smart guns at "any time in the near future."

The reliability of the technology remains "a bit tenuous," Tucker said, adding that much more research, development and testing would be needed before cops could trust the weapons with lives on the line.

Pictured at top: Eric Adams speaks during Tuesday's press conference, while student Theo Allen stands at left. Photo by John V. Santore